Regarding the allowability of Randall's at the Guild Show, I remember running into Pete Hamilton at the 1995 show and asking him why RMK was not set up. He explained, I think by saying something like the Guild considered Randall's to be production line knives--never mind that they are 100% handmade.

That always seemed ironic to me, considering that so many of the luminaries of the "custom" world over the years have had one or more employees who worked with them on a division-of-labor basis to turn out their knives, meaning that the workers' names did not (usually) go on the finished product (the only exception that I know of is the Loveless-Johnson collaboration when Steve worked with him). A couple of examples are Lile with local hires, Loveless with Johnson, Draper with Johnson and Hibben and others, etc. I never pursued this with members of the Guild, but wondered if it is a matter of "degree" versus "kind", i.e., some employees are OK, but some number of employees is too many.

Anyway, I always suspected that from the perspective of RMK it was not worth the bother--recall the saying "The best revenge is living well."